Uncle Remus, His Songs and His Sayings, II. the Wonderful Tar Baby Story, sentence 9
"Tar-Baby ain't sayin' nuthin', en Brer Fox he lay low.
Who acts: Brer · What happens: lie · To what, where: nuthin en
This is a sentence of «Uncle Remus, His Songs and His Sayings» by Joel Chandler Harris, II. the Wonderful Tar Baby Story. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (Brer), what happens, when and where, as Mova's frames read it from the tree.
Parsed by Mova, not checked by a teacher. This tree is Mova's own parse (the en model, on the CPU, when the site is built); it may be wrong.
The tree
The words, one row each (CoNLL-U)
| # | word | lemma | UPOS | features | head | relation |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | " | " | PUNCT | _ | 5 ai | punct |
| 2 | Tar | tar | NOUN | Number=Sing | 4 Baby | compound |
| 3 | - | - | PUNCT | _ | 2 Tar | punct |
| 4 | Baby | Baby | PROPN | Number=Sing | 5 ai | nsubj |
| 5 | ai | be | AUX | Mood=Ind Number=Sing Person=3 Tense=Pres VerbForm=Fin | root | root |
| 6 | n't | not | PART | Polarity=Neg | 7 sayin | advmod |
| 7 | sayin | sayin | NOUN | Number=Sing | 5 ai | obj |
| 8 | ' | ' | PUNCT | _ | 11 en | punct |
| 9 | nuthin | nuthin | NOUN | Number=Sing | 11 en | compound |
| 10 | ', | ', | PART | _ | 9 nuthin | dep |
| 11 | en | en | NOUN | Number=Sing | 7 sayin | conj |
| 12 | Brer | Brer | PROPN | Number=Sing | 13 Fox | compound |
| 13 | Fox | fox | NOUN | Number=Sing | 11 en | conj |
| 14 | he | he | PRON | Case=Nom Gender=Masc Number=Sing Person=3 PronType=Prs | 15 lay | nsubj |
| 15 | lay | lie | VERB | Mood=Ind Number=Sing Person=3 Tense=Past VerbForm=Fin | 11 en | acl:relcl |
| 16 | low | low | ADJ | Degree=Pos | 15 lay | xcomp |
| 17 | . | . | PUNCT | _ | 5 ai | punct |
Pragmatics
| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | lie in a quote | past | Brer | nuthin en and Brer Fox not said here | low property | vn spatial_configuration-47.6 «PP.location V NP»: agent=Location en=Theme |
One row per clause the reader finds. «not said here»: a role filled from the clause above. «roles by»: a VerbNet class and frame when one fits the verb, else the reader's rules on the tree.
Text: «Uncle Remus, His Songs and His Sayings» by Joel Chandler Harris, Project Gutenberg book 2306 (public domain in the USA). Tree: Mova's own parse, Elamur Cosmic License. Frames: Mova's frames reader (prag), the chapter read in order.
This page in Markdown → https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/tales/pg2306/5/9/